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Bring your profit and loss statement to life and react faster to emerging trends

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Bring your profit and loss statement to life and react faster to emerging trends

Demand from branch managers through to board members for up-to-date accurate financial information has made monthly performance and cash-flow predictions unfit for purpose.For many businesses, static report versions of financial statements like profit and loss aren’t effective in responding to dramatic changes in trading conditions.

The identify issue—consider root cause—respond cycle — has compressed to such an extent that new ways to extract actionable insights from financial data have become a business imperative. There isn’t time for the traditional back and forth exchange of spreadsheets between those running the business and the finance team.

Leaders and managers need interactive, explorable and dynamic representations of financial data to extract actionable insights on the performance of their business. As a result, there has been significant interest from finance specialists in applying Business Intelligence to financial analysis. Agile financial software helps finance leaders to remain in the know as business needs and the economy change.

Keep organized and on top of key financial indicators

Phocas Financial Statements is an example of financial software that allows a business to apply business intelligence to financial analysis to review your numbers in many ways – or, as we like to refer to it, Phocas Financial Statements brings your financials to life.

The video below provides a quick overview of the ubiquitous Profit and Loss statement and how it can be configured to suit your needs in dynamic financial software.



You can switch views to look at expenses in more detail and bring them to the forefront of the Profit and Loss statement making it easier to see the critical operating expenses on the statement.

Perhaps you are more interested in financial metrics, so you can also view a version that focuses on sales per day, wages as a percentage of sales and key margins calculations such as gross profit margin, operating profit margin and EBITDA margin.

Finance teams can refine Profit and Loss Statements to suit the detail you need, such as comparing actual performance against multiple budgets, forecasts, and re-forecasts. Thus, there is much flexibility with a press of a button. This is the key to delivering timely information to those who need it to drive their business forward in challenging times.

Managers want to switch easily between views of profitability by month, quarter, year on year so they can have data-driven collaborative conversations while interacting with dynamic Profit and Loss statements.

It is vital to have dynamic and interactive financial statements in the hands of key decision-makers to allow for self-diagnosis of performance challenges. It will enable a business to respond quickly and decisively to emerging challenges and then directly identify the impacts positively or negatively in a compressed timeframe.

To learn about getting more from your Profit and Loss statement, download the Modern financial planning and analysis ebook.

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Companywide financial planning and analysis

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Written by Nick Collett
Nick Collett

A financial services professional who help develop Phocas FP&A software to help business people gain insights from financial data.

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